


Still Life in Black and White

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 02:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1534865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane's life is a series of missed moments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life in Black and White

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heyjupiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyjupiter/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Enjoy! :) Thank you to my wonderful beta, Chaosprincess! :)

When Jane was a little girl, her family had a cat. A big, fluffy black and white Siamese cat that was declawed and pretty friendly… She never bit anyone at least. Never tried to scratch anyone.

But she didn’t really engage anyone, either. She was aloof. Jane would sit on her belly and watch the cat strut back and forth across the carpet, queen of the castle. 

Jane had decided that she wanted to be like that. It all seemed so regal; not having to take orders from anybody, not having to be on some kind of a set schedule. Ivory – for that was the cat’s name – did what she wanted, when she wanted. So she’d stuck up her nose and started refusing every time her father tried to convince her to do something – her homework, her chores, even things that she actually wanted to do.

Her father, exasperated, had brought her in to some child psychologist who had explained it as Jane trying to deal with the fact that she’d grown up without her mother. She’d only been one, the woman had reminded Donald within earshot, “and what toddler knows how to deal with her world getting rocked like that?”  
After that Jane had lost interest in the game. It had seemed wrong, somehow, after that. Like by bringing her mother into it the psychologist had trodden on hallow ground. She started behaving. For a while, at least.

***

When Jane was fourteen, her teacher suggested she should go to counseling.

“You’ve been sneaking out to smoke, to get into trouble,” she told her, pursing her lips like some kind of all-knowing king. Jane wanted to wipe the look right off of her face. What the hell did she know?

Jane crossed her arms. She wondered what a tattoo would look like across the skin on her upper arm. Probably pretty cool. 

“No I haven’t,” she replied with a smile. 

“Don’t lie to me, Miss Margolis. I’ll have you know that I’ll call your father. I’m trying to help you. You ought to talk to a counselor.” The teacher’s eyes lit up like somebody rang a doorbell. “What you need is a mentor. A mother figure.”

Jane reached in her pocket and pulled out her pack of cigarettes. She slid one between her fingers, gazing at the black nail polish as she lit it up and blew the smoke right in her face.

***

“You ever try H?”

Jane was seventeen and beautiful. 

“No.” She pulled her legs up into herself and looked across at the friend-of-a-friend she’d somehow ended up talking to at this party. She’d heard there would be cool people there, and she was less concerned with the fact that her father had no idea where she was. She had muttered something about a sleepover at a friend’s before she’d left for school in the morning. Maybe she would luck out and the man would, for once in his life, accept one of her explanations at face value. 

Yeah, fat chance.

“You wanna try, baby? It’s like nothing else.”

Jane looked at him, laughing for a moment, thinking she’d tell him no… But there was some kind of appeal to it, the way she’d heard it talked about in books and movies. Hadn’t a lot of the most famous songwriters used heroin? And most of them seemed to have turned out all right. Except for the ones that had O.D.ed, flown too high and burnt out. But that thought was actually kind of cool. Chancing death, skirting it by, refusing to be owned by it, won by it.

After all, the other option was listening to the guy behind her talk about how “in the Bible it says it’s okay to have slaves as long as they’re from a different planet than you are.”

“Sure. Yeah. Let’s try it.” She was ready to do something completely off-the-wall. It would be like riding a wave, or maybe flying. She didn’t know what it would be.

She rolled up her sleeve, and he gently pressed down on her wrist. As he prepared the needle, she realized that she didn’t actually know his name. That was a shame, she thought to herself, she really should ask him. The first person to experience this with… she should remember his name.

***

Donald Margolis was shaking his head, and Jane had her arms crossed with a frustrated sigh. Why did the man always have to do this, lay some kind of guilt trip on her? It would be easier if he didn’t care at all, if he just tossed her out or slapped her across the face or something. Instead, as usual, he was talking to her.

“I can’t describe how disappointed I am in you, Jane,” he was saying. “You should know better. You’re supposed to be smarter than this.”

“Can you just lay off already, Dad?” Jane hissed. “I don’t need to hear this.”

“I really think you do.” Her father’s voice was calm, but she was sure she could see smoke coming out of his ears. She couldn’t care less; he didn’t need to lord this over her. She hadn’t asked him to give up his whole life for her or whatever he had done. She hadn’t asked to be born or for any of this at all. She didn’t need him. She’d be an adult in months. All she needed was herself. “You’re going to rehab.”

“What?” Of all the things out of his mouth, Jane had not expected this. She had been sure that she could have wormed her way out of this one – she hadn’t even overdosed or something crazy like that, and it was only stupid campus cops who had raided the place anyway, it wasn’t even that big of a deal. “You can’t be serious! I’m graduating in a month! I can’t go to rehab. I’d miss graduation.” She was sure now that he had to be putting her on. There was no way that he would miss his only child’s graduation, right? Or that he would let her miss it.

“They’ll mail you your diploma, Jane,” he told her, but she could already tell that he was wavering.

“I’ll do better. I promise. I just made a mistake.” She sounded panicky when she said it. There was no way. No way she’d go to rehab and have all of those counselors poking around at her head, asking her questions. There was no way.

***

When Jane turned eighteen, she had been accepted at the University of New Mexico. Her father had been nodding – smiling and nodding, as if this was right, as if he had hoped it would be this way and he had known it would be all along.

Yet his smile didn’t reach his eyes, and Jane couldn’t find it in herself to fake a smile back. She shoved the big envelope until the sketchbook and went back to what she had been drawing.

It was a picture of a woman with dark hair and blue eyes. She was perfect.

***

Jane lived in a dorm, relishing the idea of being away from home. Her father had been less than enthusiastic about the idea. 

“Jane, I don’t want to hear about you slipping up… I think you should stay at home and commute.”

She had looked at him, fury building behind eyes that were tearing up.

“I’m not living at home for college,” she hissed. “I’ll get a job. I’ll pay for my own room and board. Not like you don’t have the money.” Air traffic controllers made a lot of money, she knew. She had looked it up once and been surprised to realize that her family could be considered rich. Not that she felt like it, even if she didn’t want for anything, even if she lived in a nice house.

But she’d never felt like the girls at school who everyone said were rich. She didn’t have a horse or spend weekends in France or go out boating every weekend. Not that she wanted to if she could.

What she wanted was to branch out on her own, to make her failures and successes her own and stop feeling like everything reflected back, positively or negatively, on her father. She didn’t want to hear the little voice in her head that still said, _He gave up everything for you. He lost the woman he loved for you._

The voice that would always continue, _and what have you given him? You’re a junkie screw-up._

She needed to get out. She couldn’t keep listening to that voice.

“Trust me,” she told him, and she batted her eyes, looked as innocent as she could. Like she was ten years old again and had stolen candy from the store. 

“Jane… Don’t make me regret saying yes to this.”

“You won’t!” She ran up and hugged him tight. “You won’t regret it. I’m going to get all A’s.”

And she would, she told herself as she unpacked her things and waited for her roommate to arrive. All A’s. I’ll make him proud this time.

I’ll make her proud, too, she added, but chased away the thought.

***

“So are you, like, one of those goth kinda chicks?” her roommate asked, curling up her nose and looking at Jane with disdain.

“I’m an artist,” Jane explained instead, looking down at the picture she had just sketched. It was her, flying high in the clouds, or maybe it was even another galaxy; that was kinda dorky but kind of cool just the same. She didn’t know what direction she wanted to go with it. That was the cool thing – it was all open, all undecided, a blob that hadn’t been made into something yet, hadn’t been molded or formed. Once you made a decision, you committed to it; once you started to make something, you could screw it up.

“Wow,” the roommate responded, oozing fake interest. Jane had already forgotten what the girl’s name was, but it was one of those frilly sorts of names that ended with an I where there should have been a Y. Jane wondered briefly if she would be this kind of girl if her parents had dubbed her Jani instead of simply Jane.  
She wondered how her parents had even made the decision to name her that. It suited her, maybe, but it didn’t always have the best connotations – like Plain Jane. Who wanted that to be the first thing people thought when people met them?

But she’d much rather be Jane than some sparkly name, some marshmallow name that fell apart when someone tried to poke them.

Her mother’s name had been Dina. That was a good name.

Jane looked away and shook her head. Being named Jane was all right.

***

She had dropped out of college after a semester. Lived with some friends she’d met on the other side of town. The fun part of town. A lot of them were tattoo artists, or bikers, and they all used drugs. They partied into the early hours of the morning and then slept all day.

It wasn’t a bad life. They liked Jane; they liked the tattoos that she did. She couldn’t even remember how she had started doing them – it was as if she had woken up one day and she was in the middle of shooting dye through a needle into some man’s milky-white back.

Maybe it was like being born, or born again, or something crazy but right like that.

They gave her all the stuff she wanted. Junk and coke. She was like a mini princess; so much better than college.

Up until the day her father knocked on the door, freaking out, yelling and screaming about calling the police.

She was in rehab the next day, bouncing off the walls, cursing the man. Wishing she’d never been born. Wishing he had just walked away. What had been keeping him, anyway? She was an adult. She didn’t need him. She had never needed him.

She tried to smash a window and only succeeded in busting up her hand. Even though the haze of drugs she hadn’t come down off of, she felt it. Maybe she’d broken it for good. Maybe she would never draw again.

Maybe that was her punishment for it all. For screwing up. For the wish she’d just had. There was another one, then, wishing she’d never come along and destroyed her father’s life. He could have gotten on with his, otherwise. Gotten remarried and had a new little perfect family without his problem child daughter weighing him down.

She clutched her hand against her chest and tried her hardest not to sob.

***

She held the eighteen-month chip between her fingers. She had grown up. She worked a respectable job now – well, as respectable as she could get and still respect herself. She was a tattoo artist, but with direct deposit and a paycheck that took out taxes. Her coworkers were friendly (sometimes overly so, trying desperately to brush shoulders with her as they passed by each other and getting disheartened when she gave them a “never gonna happen” sort of gaze) and, other than one or two biker guys, all seemingly without criminal records or arms full of tract marks.

“Jane.” She looked up, coming up out of what she had been thinking about. Sometimes it was easy to lose time, to find one’s self wondering how they got to that point. She saw herself as the little one year old who had – what had she done? When had she known that…

She snapped herself out of it to look at her father and smile. It was easier to smile these days, at least most of the time. She was doing okay. She wasn’t going to make him go prematurely gray – or had she already done that? Where was she? The year, the moment, her age – that was right, twenty-six. Twenty-six but feeling sixteen, fourteen, ten.

“Yeah?” she asked, scratching her neck.

“I’m proud of you.”

She blinked at him. If he only knew. He wouldn’t be proud of her. She wasn’t proud of her. The idea of spending a lifetime on Earth and only leaving behind a junkie daughter sent a chill up her spine. Didn’t everyone want their kids to be doctors, lawyers, or the next corral of saints?

And hadn’t she been feeling just fine a moment ago? Where had the shame come from? In that simple sentence? Maybe if his approval had been more hard-won, maybe if she had needed something to show for it, other than just eighteen months of not horrifically screwing up her life. 

There was something to live up to. Maybe there always had been.

She bit her lip and ran her fingers through her hair.

“Thanks. It means a lot.”

***

Jane lay back on the bed, looking up at Jesse Pinkman with glazed-over eyes.

Everything was quiet. So very quiet.

They were going to go to New Zealand in the morning, were going to stay together. Jesse was sweet. He knew how to have fun, how to make her smile. They would be done with this. She was sure of it – a change of scenery would drown out the voice caterwauling in her head. 

They would maybe even get married – maybe she would change it all, make the biggest commitment at all. The craziest, impossible to understand commitment, because why would anyone want to be tethered to another person for the rest of their days? But she would do it. Just to prove that she could change. That she had changed.

Maybe she would have a baby with Jesse Pinkman, a little girl. One that she would never leave, no matter what. She wouldn’t abandon her – was that what it was, was that what it had felt like? Abandonment? No. It wasn’t as if Jane’s mother had had something better to do.

It had just been her time.

Jane absentmindedly curled in closer on Jesse. Everyone had a time, she thought. No one knew what it was. It was some great, hidden world secret and it seemed to come along at the time you had the most to live for, the most to hang on for. There was always something left to do, something really important.

Jane took a deep breath and laid one of her legs across Jesse’s. They had so much money. Tomorrow, she was going to figure out what that big important thing was. Tomorrow.


End file.
